Introduction

This compilation presents a partial view of the science carried out at the ESRF during the period from September 1995 to July 1996. Its conciseness is due to three reasons:

a lot of experimental data have not yet been fully analysed,

some people are afraid to publish even a preliminary version of their work, before it has been published in a scientific journal, and we have to limit the report to a reasonable size.

The full annual report of the ESRF will be available on the World Wide Web (WWW) at the beginning of 1997.

During this eleven month period the quality of the X-ray source continued to improve and a brilliance of 1020 ph/sec/mm2/mrad2/0.1%BW was achieved with a 3.3 metre undulator and a 16 mm gap. Our next goal is to reach 7 x 1020 by using a smaller gap and a 5 metre undulator, and by reducing the emittance.

The results described herein confirm what was already visible last year: that this kind of source opens completely new possibilities in various areas of research, for example high pressure in the range of 1-3 Mbar, inelastic scattering with meV resolution, imaging, protein crystallography (10-20 µm samples or very large proteins), to cite but a few of the areas concerned.

The experiments were carried out on twenty-one public beamlines and four CRG (Collaborating Research Groups) beamlines.

A few months ago, faced with a demand to severely reduce the ESRF budget (by 7%), the construction of the last three or four beamlines was under serious threat of being abandoned. A solution has since been found meaning the ESRF will be able to bring to completion the installation of the thirty public beamlines, as originally planned.

We would like to thank all the ESRF staff from the various divisions who gave their best to ensure the continuous operation of the facility and without whom these exciting results would not have been possible. We would also like to thank our users whose ideas for novel and exciting experiments have been decisive in making the ESRF such a success.